Abstract
The spread and impacts of exotic species are unambiguous, global threats to many ecosystems. A prominent example is the suite of annual grasses in the Bromus genus (Bromus hereafter) that originate from Europe and Eurasia but have invaded or are invading large areas of the Western USA. This book brings a diverse, multidisciplinary group of authors together to synthesize current knowledge, research needs, and management implications for Bromus. Exotic plant invasions are multifaceted problems, and understanding and managing them requires the biological, ecological, sociological, and economic perspectives that are integrated in this book. Knowing how well information from one geographic or environmental setting can transfer to another is a key need for broadly distributed Bromus species especially given ongoing climate change. Thus, the chapters in the book compare and contrast invasibility of different ecoregions and invasiveness of different Bromus species. A universal theme is managing for ecosystems that are resilient to disturbance and resistant to invasion which will be essential for adaptation to the human-caused problem of Bromus in the Western USA.
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Acknowledgments
Jessica Vander Veen provided invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript for submission. Sue Phillips provided comments on many chapters. Funding was provided by USDA REENet Grant #03083. Plant taxonomy follows the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, PLANTS Database (http://plants.usda.gov) in all but Chap. 6 which uses a broader range of sources. Any use of trade names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Germino, M.J., Chambers, J.C., Brown, C.S. (2016). Introduction: Exotic Annual Bromus in the Western USA. In: Germino, M., Chambers, J., Brown, C. (eds) Exotic Brome-Grasses in Arid and Semiarid Ecosystems of the Western US. Springer Series on Environmental Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24930-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24930-8_1
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